


Where the ocean goes

by Nebulous Bounds (RainonyourBack)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ben Solo Lives, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, On the Run
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22423345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainonyourBack/pseuds/Nebulous%20Bounds
Summary: Sometimes getting out alive is the victory. Sometimes the rest takes a little time.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 11
Kudos: 20
Collections: For one is both and both are one in love: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange





	Where the ocean goes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elywyngirlie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elywyngirlie/gifts).



Ben’s eyes roll back, and he falls backwards.

For a moment Rey sees it, the tragedy that is his body stiff and limp. She grabs onto his arm, shields his fall, and says, _“no.”_

Her voice is more than wind, more than breath. It is an order, a demand. She fights exhaustion, maneuvers until his head is in her lap, cradles the mass that is his body, and she calls again.

“ _Be with me_.”

She doesn’t repeat it. Doesn’t look elsewhere for support. No ghosts will help her here. He needs to be the one to answer the call, to make the effort, the tremendous effort.

Her life force sparks through him, helping him along, keeping him close. He needs to come back. He needs to –

He crumbles to dust beneath her hands.

**ꙮ**

Rey shot upright, and found only darkness.

It was nowhere as cold as Exegol, though, and not as deep. There she could find her center, calm down and go back to sleep.

Something shifted besides her, and Rey smiled.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t,” he lied, sitting up besides her. She must have brought him along, unwittingly. There was still so much she didn’t control about the bond between them. Not that he did, either, but she still felt bad. Seeing yourself die –

“No need to worry,” he whispered, raising a hand to run it through her wild hair. “Just a dream.”

“A pretty crummy one. You’d think after last night we’d at least be naked.”

She winked, and delighted in his choking on air. Ben, she found, was not very self-conscious, but definitely sensitive to jibes.

He also knew it when she tried to evade a topic. How often did he have to tell her not to run?

“I am here. I am fine.” He paused tentatively. “And halfway to naked, if it helps.”

Rey chortled.

“You know I can take whatever I want,” she teased. But instead of the laughter she hoped to produce, she sensed him tense, like there was something in the words she could not detect. She disengaged, fell back to the bed. “Sorry for waking you.”

“I’m thankful, you know,” he said quietly. “For your dreams.”

“Oh?”

“Everything is so… quiet otherwise.”

He did not elaborate, and Rey didn’t quite want to push, so they left it at that. She leaned in until she could wrap an arm around his massive form, burying her face into his hair. He smelled good. Alive.

“Good night, Ben.”

“Good night, Rey.”

**ꙮ**

The air was crisp in Varykino that morning. The cold waters surrounding the island lapped gently at the beach, and Rey stared out where the ocean met the sky.

In her hands, a busted com she had promised to repair for a neighbor. She’d opened the thing, but could not bring herself to look at it.

“Do you want to call them?”

Turning back towards Ben, Rey kept silent. She hadn’t heard him coming, so focused she was on the sky, and wasn’t that proof enough? It was useless to try to hide what he could so easily sense from their bond, but she still wanted to keep these things for herself. The pain and confusion from having left without a word, of not even knowing if any of them was alright. They had to be. She would have felt it, wouldn’t she? If they were dead.

Ben stood there, clad in his familiar black, big and awkward.

Lowering her head, she sighed.

“I still don’t know what to say.”

He did not touch her, did not comment. There was nothing he could say that would help. He knew how it felt, to be too scared to call, to desire so ardently something that you did not feel worthy of. He knew he had missed his chance with his mother. He knew she shouldn’t waste hers with her friends – but he knew she also knew all these things, and he did not want to salt a wound he so personally caused.

“Whatever you decide,” he said after a moment. “I will be with you.”

Rey raised her eyes to his, and nodded.

**ꙮ**

There had not been any time, after the defeat of Palpatine. The monster, the rotten thing that had poisoned Ben and her, was dead, and Ben was unconscious, and the sky was falling.

Rey dragged him. She didn’t really know where, at first, because it was all so dark and she had no idea how to get back to the surface. The ceilings and walls around them creaked ominously, threatening to crumble at any moment. Perhaps she could have gotten out and flown her ship in, but she did not want to leave his side. If she let him out of her sight, she knew she would not see him again.

“Ben,” she pleaded this time, “wake up. Just wake up, please.”

She knew he was alive. He had a pulse, he was breathing, and she could feel him in the Force. He was just unconscious. Unconsciously large and impossible to carry. She still tried, leaning him against the wall before trying to hoist him up on her shoulder. He was so tall it felt like he was draped all the way to the floor on both sides of her. She managed a few dozen meters, and then a few dozen more.

In truth, she didn’t really know how she got them out at all. She didn’t know if it was luck or the Force that held the walls around them as she walked and crawled and dug their way out. It only gave way once they were both on his ship.

She had entered a random destination, and then they were gone.

**ꙮ**

She kept at it for a whole week and still did not get any further with the darned thing. He saw her stalk the streets surrounding their home like a caged lion, hands empty. She couldn’t sit in front of it without growling.

“Bring it back. I can’t do anything for that one,” she finally spat, before walking off in a huff.

He wanted to stop her, he did. He just did not know how, and his words froze in his mouth.

“… Alright,” he told the empty air.

**ꙮ**

Com in hand, he made his way down the street. The village was slowly dying off, they had been told when they first arrived. It used to be prolific, when the Naberries still came around regularly. They didn’t, anymore.

The com neighbor was an old woman. She lived alone in one of the small houses bordering the crumbling palace. Water had eaten at its foundations, making it too dangerous to live in, she’d explained to Rey while he was standing nearby. A shame. It was so beautiful.

He wondered how recent this was. In the past, he had never taken an interest in that side of his grandfather’s life. Sources were scant and the voice…

But the voice hadn’t been his, had it?

With a sigh, he knocked on the door of the old woman’s house. Hopefully she was in. He didn’t want to bring the thing back where Rey could see it and make her angry.

He waited some time, busying his mind in contemplation of the palace. Maybe going there wouldn’t be so bad of an idea. He was the one to offer Varykino when Rey asked where they were going. He’d woken up lying in the back of his ship, staring at her back, the strands of her hair flying everywhere while she flipped commands. She didn’t know this ship yet, but it wouldn’t have been immediately obvious to anyone else. There was an instinct to her. A knowledge.

She sensed him awake, and without turning, asked _where_. And before he thought about it he’d just said, _Varykino_. A series of coordinates fell off his lips and into her fingers. He barely needed to even say them.

“You are from the Resistance,” the child said.

He froze, almost dropping the com, forcefully brought back to the present. It was a small child, a girl, with dark hair braided tightly around her head like a crown. It was the girl who visited the old woman sometimes.

“What?”

“I saw your ship, when you landed.”

“My ship,” he repeated.

They sold his ship. At the first seedy trading hub he managed to remember. It was too recognizable, and very awkward with two people in when it was only meant for one. Sold it for pennies, too, because it _was_ too recognizable, but Rey haggled and intimidated her way into exchanging it for a ship that could hold them both and a few days’ rations.

A junkyard of a ship, maybe, but still.

His heart had frozen when he saw it. She was avoiding his eyes as she explained, showed him the stacked rations and equipment, rolled off the list of features. It wasn’t heavily modified, and it was a more recent model, but the lines were roughly the same. The shape of it.

It was a Corellian YT-1600f light freighter, meant for cargo transport. She’d managed to find them both mattresses to sling into one of the cargo compartments, she explained, and they could even make a little money by transporting something in the empty compartment, depending on where they decided to go.

“No,” he’d said.

“It’s the only thing I got,” she pressed. “It runs well. It passed all the tests I could think of. It’s a steal, at this price. We can keep the rest of the money to hunker down somewhere and wait it all out.”

He’d looked at her and wanted to scream.

“I can’t,” was all he said. “Rey, I can’t.”

She’d taken his hand.

“I know you can. It’s do this or die here, Ben, and you can’t die here.”

She was right. So, in the end, he got on.

And now this child thought…

“Yeah! It’s the ship! Everyone knows about the Falcon.”

This child clearly didn’t _know_ about the Falcon. The newer model was different in countless ways, Han’s modifications notwithstanding, and there were many.

But this child… The light in her eyes…

“Yeah,” he lied. “It is.”

She bounced on her feet, so very happy. He drew a finger to his lips, and he saw understanding dawn in her eyes.

“I won’t tell,” she promised, in a whisper. “Nobody.”

“Good.”

She smiled, and he wanted to jump into the waters below Varykino. Then she looked at the com in his hands, and the house behind them.

“Do you want me to go get grandma? She’s probably in the garden.”

He looked at the house, too. Was this really for the likes of him? A comfortable house, with friendly neighbors, who thought him from the Resistance? The lie was abhorrent. He felt like he had tar up to his throat.

“Sir?

“… No.” He took in a deep breath. “We are not done with it. I just wanted to see how she was doing. Just tell her it’s going to take a while more.”

The child nodded, and scampered off around the house.

**ꙮ**

He went at it at night, when she slept.

It wasn’t that he intentionally wanted to hide it from her. Or rather, it was.

He remembered the countless droids aboard the First Order ships, the way everything was mechanized, automatized. He never had to touch anything there. He thought himself good with his hands, and when it came to fighting and the Force he was.

He was still a blundering beast when it came to such fragile components. He had managed not to break any, but he still couldn’t get the bits to fall in properly. So many times he’d nearly chucked the entire thing at the wall, or done so, before freezing it with the Force before it hit.

This was his one chance. If he broke it, if he shattered it…

If he shattered it, what?

“You look tired,” Rey said one morning. “Bad dreams?”

“No,” he answered, too surprised not to be honest. “No, my head is empty.”

It was since she destroyed the Emperor. No one had spoken in it since, whether through voices or dreams or anything, except her. The Force… Even the Force was different. A soft, gentle ripple on the water, no longer a brutal wave through him.

Rey looked concerned. That, too, he didn’t know how to handle. If she looked too long at him he felt sometimes uncomfortable. It wasn’t the same in the dark. It wasn’t the same when they were touching, holding each other…

“Ben,” she said quietly, taking a step towards him. “Ben, I know you’re not okay.”

He tried to muster up a grin, couldn’t.

“Ben, I’m not okay either.”

That, too, he knew.

“And that’s fine.”

That he didn’t know.

“That’s why we’re here. That’s why I couldn’t repair the damn com. That’s why I’m not… That’s why we’re here, see? We’ll wait here until we’re… better.”

She glanced at the forest behind the village, and he felt it, her longing for another forest, one that had her friends in it. Friends she couldn’t contact because he was there. Or at least… that was how he thought about it until then. But the way she looked… It wasn’t just that, he realized. It was a deeper, darker fear, something ugly and torn. The more she waited, the harder it would be. The deeper the abyss would become.

He needed to fix this.

He _would_ fix this.

“Thank you, Rey,” he said sincerely. She looked back towards him, and then stepped in for a hug, a warm embrace, tight around his chest. There was no hesitation when he returned it, listening to her thrum in the Force.

“We will get better,” he promised. He didn’t know how. He would never have thought so of himself before. But now… Now he had to. For her. He couldn’t let her get better alone and be stuck waiting for him to be fixed. “We will get better.”

**ꙮ**

They didn’t.

He still couldn’t fix the com, try as he might. He tried it again and again, but there was just no way to pick up a signal, and it was evident he did not know enough about these things to do it alone, but he couldn’t tell Rey.

For her part, she toiled away at Sola’s gardens. He did, too – that was the agreement, work for food – but she went above and beyond, working at all hours just to use up the daylight. She liked the work, he knew, liked to get her hands full of good dirt and see what sprouted from it. He also knew she was making herself busy.

In the night they embraced. Sometimes they did more, and then they managed to joke around the pain.

He went down by their eldery neighbor at the end of the afternoon, intent on collecting Rey before dusk. He could feel her frustration miles away, and he didn’t want her to take it out on an unsuspecting vegetable. Growing food was a difficult task for her. She had loved the concept, the idea, told him she knew all about growing food.

Then he saw her sit down at a table, put a seed on her empty bowl, and pour some water over it. Then she waited excitedly for five, ten, fifteen seconds. Then she’d frowned.

Sola had almost laughed her out of the house when she explained how food was really _grown_ and not just hydrated. Since then Rey had tried it the old woman’s way, but every day the vegetables weren’t ready were another measure of frustration.

Sola looked upon it all with a kind of maternal affection that he found very uncomfortable to consider for too long.

“She’s been at it since you left,” the old woman told him. She held a hand to her back. “She keeps whispering at them. My plants. I don’t have the heart to tell her they can’t hear her.”

He looked at her, but couldn’t tell if she was serious.

“I’m sorry for her,” he said, unsure of what she wanted. Immediately, she waved the words away.

“It’s nothing. Spring is always impatient. Speaking of, do you have any news of my long-distance gadget?”

Immediately he went still. Right. She thought…

“She’s, we’re, we’re on it,” he said, and he cursed this sudden stammer. He hadn’t done such a bashful thing in years. He could feel himself flushing, and it was downright shameful.

Sola looked at him with something that was terrifyingly close to understanding. He felt exposed in his light outfit – one of the ones Rey had originally bought with the freighter. There was nothing wrong with it, but a weight missing, the comforting cradle of the mask.

“That’s fine. I don’t need it for anything urgent, I just like knowing I have a way to send messages off-planet,” she admitted easily.

He couldn’t say anything, so he just nodded.

“You know, I am very glad you both arrived here. Varykino can get so lonely now that my daughters never come here anymore, and everyone else mostly left.”

She droned on about her daughters, and he half-listened, glad she had seemingly dropped the matter of the com.

“In the summer, Jobal goes back to school in the capital. I used to get very lonely then. But now I know you two will be there,” she continued.

He hadn’t thought that far. Summer. Would Rey be able to stay in one place for the whole of spring, even? Would they still be there?

“Good,” he muttered, although there was nothing good about the thought. Why was he even bothering with the com? If he fixed it, and she used it, she would leave. He would be alone, entirely alone. He had never been alone before. There was always the voices, if nothing else. And he should want it, appreciate it, this no-nonsense loneliness that loomed, but…

It was a frightening thought.

“Oh, Ben, you’re here!”

Rey. Rey was before him, and she smiled, dirt up to her eyes and something oddly like a carrot in her hand. “I found one that’s ripe! I did it, I grew something!”

The way she was smiling was contagious, and he broke into a similar grin. The first vegetable grown by her entirely from start to finish.

“It is ripe, right, Sola? Jobal told me it was, but she’s so little and it’s been such a long time and…”

“It is ripe, lass,” Sola smiled. “You can go eat it, if you like.”

Rey almost shoved it in his face, and so he took it, appreciating it for what it was. Before coming here food was almost never natural. He suspected he’d eaten his fair share of this particular one, pureed or sautéed or whatever it was, but it had never… felt real.

“Good job, Rey,” he smiled.

“I’ll go see if any more are ready!”

And just like that she’d bounded back towards the patch. It was nice to see her so happy. So content, for one precious moment.

Sola sighed.

“Patience and love are all it takes,” she said to no one in particular. “For most things. It’s good that you’re trying.”

He swallowed. Did she mean him?

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said in the long pause that followed.

“That is perfectly normal. Patience is hard to learn. Anakin never got much of it.”

He went still. So still.

He had thought them safe here. It was out of the way, no one knew of this place, they’d come on a clean ship with clean clothes, nobody had seen him out of a mask in years but Rey and other people who were all _dead_ and –

“Calm down,” the old lady said. “You’re just like him, sometimes.”

“I’m not…”

“Oh, right! You have no idea what I’m on about, are you?”

Her face split into a wide grin and she bellowed a laugh so loud, he thought her mad. “What…”

“It’s a silly thing, that one. When I was young – my sister married him in secret, you see, they were about your age, is all. Padme Amidala, right? Anakin was a bright young man, very silly, very in love. Never too patient, though. When I look at you two – she and you – I see them, a lot. It’s nice. So that’s my advice for you. Take heart. Be patient. It takes time for carrots to grow.”

Then she grinned.

“Some more than others.”

He pretended he didn’t understand, because he refused to. He’d never – he’d never looked into the past of Padme Amidala. The voices said enough. The voices said what he would find would be lies, biased fabrications meant to lighten a figure of the dark, of rejuvenation, of new beginnings.

He’d never considered that Anakin could be _silly_ and _impatient_ and _in love_. He thought the marriage a ploy, something needed to ensure the bloodline.

“Ben!”

Rey was calling from the edge of the garden. She held another oddly-shaped vegetable up for him to see.

“I have another! Come and get it.”

He stayed where he was, still reeling.

“I’ll eat it all if you don’t! Race you to the palace for it!”

And she started running, and he knew her laughter was partly fabricated. But that was part of it, wasn’t it? Fake it til you make it. He saw it now. He could choose this, if he wanted to.

Patience and love.

“I’m coming,” Ben called, and he started after her.

**Author's Note:**

> There it is!  
> I was so nervous about this exchange, I really wanted to do it but I was so worried. I so rarely write for another fandom than Shaman King and... Reylo is such a special ship to me. I've never been able to properly engage with this ship as much as I would have liked. So there it is! My first forray into it. I hope you liked it, Elywyngirlie ! It was Request n°2 that I felt most inspired by. I think we all need to canonize in our heads a happy ending, so here's mine.
> 
> Another daunting thing about Star Wars is the amount of research it takes. I found myself looking up all manner of names and ship models and things and I probably forgot even more things I should have researched. But that's the beauty of it! It's given me so much interesting material to play around with.
> 
> I want to thank the organizers of this exchange so much. It's been such a wonderful time and everything was so clear. I've never seen directions so easy to follow. Thank you and I hope you enjoyed this!


End file.
